Mark Lamoureux and Joan Retallack

November 15, 2008 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paint
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at http://www.rfpaints.com/

Mark Lamoureux lives in Astoria, NY. His first full-length collection, Astrometry Orgonon was published by BlazeVOX books in 2008. He is the author of 5 chapbooks: Poem Stripped of Artifice (winner of the New School 2007 Chapbooks Contest), Traceland, 29 Cheeseburgers, Film Poems and City/Temple. His work has been published in print and online in Fence, Mustachioed, miPoesias, Jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, Lungfull!, Carve Poems, Coconut, GutCult and many others. In 2006 he started Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry. He is Reviews Editor for Boog City, a Manhattan-based literary paper, and teaches composition in the CUNY system.

Joan Retallack’s most recent publication is her Gertrude Stein: Selections with an extensive introduction/discussion of Stein’s work, brought out by University of California Press. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Memnoir, Mongrelisme, How To Do Things With Words, Afterrimages, and Errata 5uite which won the Columbia Book Award chosen by Robert Creeley. Currently at work on a poetic project, “The Reinvention of Truth,” Retallack is the author of Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, Wesleyan University Press, recipient of the America Award in Belles-Lettres. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave MacMillan, co-edited with Juliana Spahr) came out in 2006. The Poethical Wager, a book of interrelated essays, was published in 2004 by the University of California Press. She was the recipient of a Lanan Foundation award for poetry in 1998-99. A collection of Retallack’s procedural poems will come out next year from Roof Books. Retallack has had the pleasure of living in the Hudson Valley since January 2000 when she became the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

In the Gallery at R&F until November 22, 2008: Fabrication vs Verse, a solo exhibition of recent encaustic paintings by Kingston-based artist, Denise Orzo.

For this recent body of work, Denise Orzo was thinking about expectations, and how they often fulfill their conclusions. Using a highly innovative and original approach to cut-paper stencils, Orzo explores the formal interplay of positive and negative space, while constructing stories about the all-too-human tendency to form our realities with incomplete fragments of information. Using photographs as source material, the artist translates these flashes and glimpses as if they were manuscripts of light, shadow and time, illustrating how what we see is informed by what we have previously seen. The controlled precision of mapping an image, the fallibility of the human hand, and the wild, tempestuous nature of painting with hot wax all combine to augment the mutability of perception.

Denise Orzo was born in Queens, New York in 1972. She spent her early years on the piscine shaped island, dually informed by the powerful expansiveness of the ocean and the crippling claustrophobia of suburbia. Orzo holds a BFA in Painting from SUNY New Paltz. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, The Wright Gallery and The Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art, among other Hudson Valley venues. The artist currently lives and works in Kingston, New York.

Brenda Coultas and Kimberly Lyons

October 18, 2008 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paint
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at http://www.rfpaints.com/

Brenda Coultas moved from Southern Indiana to New York City in 1995 in order to live among poets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She graduated from the Naropa Institute in 1994 where she studied under Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman and moved to the Lower East Side to work at the Poetry Project in St. Marks Church in the Bowery. She is the author of A Handmade Museum which won the Norma Farber Award from The Poetry Society of America, and a Greenwall Fund publishing grant from the Academy of American Poets. A Handmade Museum was published by Coffee House Press in 2003. She has served as Program Assistant and series curator at the Poetry Project in NYC. She has taught at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado and the Poetry Project in New York, City. Her writing can be found in many publications including: Conjunctions, Explosive, Brooklyn Rail, and Bombay Gin. Other books include Early Films (Rodent Press) and A Summer Newsreel (Second Story Press). She has lived a block from the Bowery, for the past ten years. Her most recent book, The Marvelous Bones of Time, is about ghosts and abolition.

Kimberly Lyons is the author of Phototherapique, a chapbook of poems co-published by Portable Press and Ketalanche Press in 2008. Other books include Saline, (Instance Press, 2005); and Abracadabra and Mettle (with artist Ed Epping) both published by Granary Books. She has had poems published recently online in Critiphora and Miopoesias and in the fall 2007 issue of Ocho and in Satellite Telephone magazine and in the 2008 issue of The Recluse magazine. Bernadette Mayer's book Studying Hunger was the topic of a talk she gave at the Conference on poetry of the 1970s held at Orono Maine in June of this year. For five years, Lyons was the program coordinator at the Poetry Project and organized lectures there: her favorites being a Gertrude Stein Day and a public reading of Frank O'Hara's poem Second Avenue held where else: on Second Avenue in New York.

In the Gallery at R&F until November 22, 2008: Fabrication vs Verse, a solo exhibition of recent encaustic paintings by Kingston-based artist, Denise Orzo.

For this recent body of work, Denise Orzo was thinking about expectations, and how they often fulfill their conclusions. Using a highly innovative and original approach to cut-paper stencils, Orzo explores the formal interplay of positive and negative space, while constructing stories about the all-too-human tendency to form our realities with incomplete fragments of information. Using photographs as source material, the artist translates these flashes and glimpses as if they were manuscripts of light, shadow and time, illustrating how what we see is informed by what we have previously seen. The controlled precision of mapping an image, the fallibility of the human hand, and the wild, tempestuous nature of painting with hot wax all combine to augment the mutability of perception.

Denise Orzo was born in Queens, New York in 1972. She spent her early years on the piscine shaped island, dually informed by the powerful expansiveness of the ocean and the crippling claustrophobia of suburbia. Orzo holds a BFA in Painting from SUNY New Paltz. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, The Wright Gallery and The Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art, among other Hudson Valley venues. The artist currently lives and works in Kingston, New York.